15 Jun
2011
15 Jun
'11
2:04 a.m.
On 2011 Jun 15, at 1:28 AM, vintagecoder at aol.com wrote:
It's not surprising in the realm of international corporate structures.
The problem in all this started with your statement that "IBM started
out as a German company".
That flies in the face of all the well-known history.
If CTR bought
out Dehomag in 1923, I would guess that Dehomag had
earlier
spun off or acquired rights from the initial US Hollerith company.
That's exactly what happened. I had the same reaction as you: why would
IBM have to buy a German Hollerith machine company when the inventor
himself was already part of the company that would become IBM? On the
face
of it, it sounds like a big circle. I guess it was because the Germans developed a better
hardware
implementation of the machines and the Americans wanted the business in
German and the rest of Europe, which Dehomag had bought the rights to.
Wikipedia has a little bit on it, not much, and I found an interesting
article on the IBM site about a restoration of one of the very early
machines from Dehomag.
http://www.ibm.com/ibm/greateribm/connections/
connections_article26.shtml